Palms Up

Most people, confronted with a dead palm tree on their property, will sooner or later have it cut down and carted away. Folks in Cocoa Beach have an alternative. They can have the dead tree topped off, then call Wayne Coombs, who, for $35 and up, will come over and carve the rest into a tiki.

Coombs, proprietor of Mai Tiki, has been carving tikis -- traditional Polynesian sculptured representations of gods or ancestors -- for 15 years. He was recuperating from an accident suffered in the boat shop where he was working, and he found carving theraputic. ''Going out and beating hell out of a log's a great release,'' he says. He's been doing it commercially for 13 years now, and his work can be seen all over the Cocoa area, in front of motels, shopping centers and condos.

He started doing location work on dead palms after the two recent freezes killed so many trees.

All of his tikis are original designs, all with a ''W'' carved below the face. ''I always prefer people to think they're buying a piece of me when they buy a piece of mine.''

Dead palms carved into tikis should last at least five years, Coombs says, if woodpeckers don't cause problems.

He doesn't keep regular hours, and, even though business has been booming lately, he refuses to regard tiki-carving as a job. ''I get up in the morning, and the very first thing I do is grab a cup of coffee and a banana and go look at the ocean. If there's waves I surf, if not I go to work.''